After the social realism of An Enemy of the People, the Arcola now switches to the poetic symbolism of The Lady from the Sea. It makes, in Hannah Eidinow's fine production, for another tremendous Ibsen evening. I can't help wishing this play had been paired with A Doll's House, written 10 years earlier in 1879, since the two works are part of Ibsen's continuing debate about the nature of freedom within marriage.

Formally, The Lady from the Sea is a pre-Freudian folk tale: Ellida Wangel, married to a provincial doctor and stepmother to his two children, dreams of the ocean and a mysterious sailor, the Stranger, to whom she feels spiritually bound. When he comes to claim her, she is forced to make a lasting choice. But Frank McGuinness's admirable new translation makes it clear that the real transformation takes place in Wangel himself: by acknowledging Ellida's right to choose, he liberates her from enthralment to the murderous matelot and lays the foundation for a true marriage.

Lia Williams' sensational Ellida highlights the nature of the play's dilemma. This is no dreamy mermaid but a woman driven to the edge of madness. With her staring eyes and fractured movements, Williams' Ellida is imprisoned by her fantasies, and when she cries to her husband "Save me", it is both a desperate plea and an emotional challenge. Confronted by this tornado of a performance, Jonathan Hackett's Wangel shrewdly suggests an earthbound patriarch learning the importance of moral choice. In a classic piece of Ibsen irony, Alison McKenna, as Wangel's elder daughter, also shows the compromises wedlock entails by pragmatically hitching herself to Sean Campion's elderly tutor. But the overwhelming virtue of this production is that it shows that marriage without freedom and equality is no more than a hollow sham.